This book focuses mainly on the new features of Windows Server 2003 and how you can integrate them into your existing infrastructure. These new changes heavily revolve around COM+, IIS 6, and web services. New features have been added to COM+ so that your applications (COM+ components) are much more stable and secure. Some of the new COM+ features are:
• Application pooling and recycling • Support for COM+ partitions • The COM+ Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) service • The Low-Memory Activation Gates service • The ability to pause and disable applications • The Process Dump tool
Much like IIS 6, COM+ applications can be pooled to run in the same worker process. They can also be recycled if something goes wrong with the application. The COM+ Partitions feature allows you to create and run multiple applications with different configurations on the same machine. For example, you can have a development and a production application (the same DLL) running on the same machine, which was not possible with previous versions of Component Services (which required you to have either a development or production version running, but not both at the same time).
